“Now that I'm here at Get Satisfaction, I realize how refreshing it is [to work with other women in tech]. You don’t realize how weird being the only woman actually is until you go somewhere else where there is not only another woman, but a woman CEO,” she said.

Women-led companies have a higher percentage of women in senior management (24.3%) than the average representation of women in executive roles in peer companies (12.2%), according to a recent report by the Corporate Women Directors International.

Think now about a recent study conducted on 1000 female executives reported only one in five women have a mentor.

Research shows that women gravitate toward women-led companies. It’s no surprise that after working among a majority of men, it’s refreshing for women to have the chance to not only work for women but receive mentoring as well.

Azita said, “I’ve never formally had a mentor, but did network with female executives that I admired and respected." She is used to being the only female in the room, being one of four female graduates in her aerospace engineering program out of 40 students at USC. She went on to have a successful career holding senior positions at Siebel, LiveOps, Salesforce and as the Chief Marketing Officer at Moxie Software.

“When you have women in leadership they naturally want to help other women grow in their careers. Mentorship is a stronger trait of women,” said Azita.

Women Leaders, Women Mentors

Get Satisfaction CEO Wendy Lea is a leader and frequently speaks to encourage and inspire other women to lead.

You will find small dogs running around her Get Satisfaction office in Potrero Hill, neutralizing the energy of the fast-paced company. The kitchen has an assortment of healthy snacks. People often congregate around the large dining table in the kitchen area that acts as the heart of the office. Wendy was a key reason Azita joined Get Satisfaction.

Together, Wendy and Azita played a key role in influencing Get Satisfaction’s Director of Data and Business Products Ramya Krishnamurthy to join the company. Prior to Get Satisfaction, Ramya worked at Klout and Fox Audience Network and never had a formal mentor. Now, the community of women in leadership roles at Get Satisfaction act as a source of formal and informal mentorship.

Ramya said, “One of the motivating factors in me joining Get Satisfaction was company culture. Wendy in particular was influential.” Ramya wanted to feel part of a company that was growing, where she would be challenged and fully supported. “People are very friendly here and at the same time driven to succeed and help others succeed, a reflection of the leadership of the company.

Earlier in her career, Ramya worked at a bank where as a product engineer, she was the only woman among 70 employees. She said, “Get Satisfaction was the first company where I had the opportunity to work with so many women executives and there are women in every department.”

“I have had many wonderful mentors and sponsors. One of the standouts was a manager at my first job, Matt Howitt. No one before or since has given me such no-holds-barred feedback on what I needed to do better, nor had such whole-hearted and faith in my awesomeness. He's still my go-to phone call for advice when I have big career decisions to make. Far more of my mentors have been men than women but that's pretty much representative of the underlying pool of people I work with,” said Jocelyn.

Niniane Wang is the CTO of Minted and a frequent contributor to Quora, answering questions around the challenges and opportunities facing women in tech. She said she felt it was important for women to have a female mentor at some point in their lives — someone they can observe on a day-to-day basis.

Niniane said, “There are things you learn from continual osmosis, which you cannot learn just from having lunch with your mentor once every month. I think it is a valuable experience for women to work at least once in their lives at a woman-run company, but I wouldn't say that they always need to prefer that over a male-run company.”

She attributes much of her success to the mentoring she had at her previous employers, Google and Microsoft.

As women move up through the ranks, we’ll see more women being hired by those senior executives - and mentored.

At the upcoming <Women 2.0 annual conference on November 14 in New York, speakers include the female founders of Match.com, Cisco, Meebo - with 80% of the attendees as female founders, entrepreneurs, technologists, business leaders, innovators and more.